Only rarely are dangerous flaws discovered in airplanes that are already in place with squadrons around the world. But that happened with an earlier North American jet fighter, the F-86 Sabre. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, we lost three or four pilots who were killed while doing rolls down on the deck. Their airplanes just went right into the ground. Investigators could not figure out why.
I flew a Sabre as a chase airplane. One day, I flew up into the Sierras to check on a favorite fishing lake. A buddy of mine named Dave Sheltren lived at the edge of the lake, and I came across low to buzz his place, did a slow roll over his house, when suddenly my aileron locked. It was a hairy moment, flying about 150 feet off the ground and upside down. But the moment I let off on the Gs, pushing up the nose, the aileron unlocked. Very strange. I climbed to 15,000 feet, where it was safer to try it again, and each time I performed that rolling maneuver, the aileron locked. I figured that somehow the wings were bending under stress and locking the aileron. I called General Boyd as soon as I landed and told him I thought I knew how those crashes occurred, but not why.
The old man sent inspectors to take apart my Sabre's wings. They found that a bolt on the aileron cylinder was installed upside down. Crew chiefs in every Sabre squadron were ordered to inspect their airplanes' wings for that upside-down bolt, while an inspection team went to the North American plant and found the culprit. He was an older man on the assembly line who ignored instructions about how to insert that bolt because, by God, he knew that bolts were supposed to be placed head up, not head down. Nobody told him how many pilots he had killed.
Those complex airplanes were unforgiving of mistakes, but some prototypes were so damned complicated that they never really got off the ground. We called them "hangar queens because that's where they sat while the engineers worked them over trying to figure out why this or that was leaking. Some were so delicate that if you kicked a tire you'd probably short a circuit. Republic had a hangar queen, a combination jet-rocket prototype, that took forever getting past taxiing tests. They taxied her so often that they wore out two sets of tires, but each time her engine was ignited, something else went wrong. As a joke, a couple of us threw a rope around her landing gear and hauled her out of the hangar at the end of a tractor. A crew chief came running up demanding to know what in hell we thought we were doing. We told him we were just taking her outside for some fresh air. The Republic guys were not amused. I flew as chase when that particular airplane finally got off the ground. Her engine exploded just as her gear was raised and the pilot was almost killed.
We lost a lot of people, mostly the victims of pilot error. Nearly twenty test pilots, some of them good friends, bought the farm during those years. One guy was killed just closing the canopy to his B-47, something went wrong and it crashed down on him, crushing his skull. Guys died because they delayed too long trying to decide whether to stay or jump. A test pilot's instinct was always to try to bring an airplane back, especially a prototype carrying expensive measuring and recording devices. Nine out of ten pilots will be killed if they attempt to deadstick back in a flamed-out jet. I only did it when I was feeling particularly good and sharp, knowing that gliding down in a jet was very tricky. Accidents occurred because all of us were flying too many different airplanes to really learn all there was to know about a specific emergency system. Flying at supersonic speeds, a pilot has a couple of seconds to take decisive corrective action when something goes alarmingly wrong. Some of the dead pilots needed more time to figure it out.
I was investigating officer on a few of the accidents. The crash site looked like a meteor-impact crater, just a smoking hole in the desert. We'd sift through the ashes searching for clues about what happened. The work was gruesome, but specially trained accident investigators almost always were able to determine the cause of a crash after a thorough job that included interviewing any eyewitnesses, recovering flight data, and analyzing bits and pieces of wreckage. But there were some fatal accidents that made no sense.
Driving into Edwards via the main gate, a visitor crossed James Fitzgerald Boulevard, en route to base headquarters. Fitz had been my backup pilot on the X-1 after Hoover. He was the best takeoff and landing pilot I ever saw. Nobody remembers that Fitz was the second pilot to break Mach 1 in the X- 1. He was a West Pointer, with a beautiful young wife and new baby, and was destined for great things as a military pilot. In late 1948, we had flown together to the Cleveland air races. Fitz returned alone, flying a T-33 with 312-gallon tip tanks on his wings. On landing, the wing hit the ground, the airplane cartwheeled, and Fitz died of terrible head injuries. How and why such a fabulous pilot was caught that way is hard to understand.
Joe Wolfe Avenue is a main drag at Edwards. Joe was a bomber pilot and a good one. He went- up in a B-47 and came down near the base housing area. Joe got caught somehow, but the wreckage provided no clues. He and I had talked about his flight the night before at my dinner table, so I know he thoroughly understood that airplane and all of its systems.
Neil Lathrop Street takes you to the main hangar complex at Edwards. Neil was a competent bomber pilot who got caught in a B-51. The old-timers at Edwards remember these guys, but in a couple of years they were just street names out there on the desert. Soon we ran out of streets to name and in a few very special circumstances, named buildings in honor of outstanding pilots who ran out of luck. Most of them died before they had really made their mark. The real art to test flying was survival maybe only a spoonful of more luck and more skill made the critical difference between a live test pilot and a street name.
In 1952, I drove around in a Model A Ford. I had as much fun driving it as tinkering with it. Joe Wolfe was the original owner. When he was killed, his wife Sylvia, sold it to Neil Lathrop for one hundred dollars. When Neil was killed, his widow sold it to me for one hundred dollars. Wanting that old car overcame my fear that it was jinxed, but I told Glennis, "If something happens to me, don't sell it to another pilot-blow it up.' When I left Edwards in 1954, I sold it to Pete Everest for one hundred dollars. We agreed that the car should always stay at Edwards, be sold from test pilot to test pilot, for no more than a hundred bucks. When Pete left, he sold it to X-2 pilot Iven Kincheloe. When Kinch was killed, his widow sold it to X-15 pilot Bob White. But Bob wasn't mechanical and couldn't keep the Model A running properly, so he broke the tradition by selling it to an airman; who took it with him when he left the service.
That I lived to sell that old car took nothing less than a miracle. After hundreds of hours of test flying my luck nearly ran out flying Larry Bell's latest rocket research airplane, the X-1A. No one who saw the flight data from that ride or heard the tapes of my voice transmissions could ever figure out how I survived-and neither could I.
GIVING CHASE
Flying chase was an art that not many test pilots bothered to perfect. There was no glory flying chase, no brownie points to score; but a skilled and dedicated chase pilot often meant the difference between a pilot's making it back or not in a dire emergency. Chuck Yeager was the best one to have flying your wing in a tight spot. Everyone wanted him to fly as chase because he had logged more rocket flying time than anyone else and knew those complex systems intimately. He was also the most skilled and experienced test pilot there, who had taken off and landed thousands of times on those lakebeds in all kinds of situations. And he had the best damned eyes of any of us and could spot trouble before a warning light flashed on the instrument panel.